E3 awards
Wii wins best in show award. So this justifies Nintendo’s actions. When they eventually get raped in the free market they can at least say, “Oh well, other industry people thought it could work, too.”

Spore won best PC game and best original game. Gears of War picked up a few awards, and the DS Zelda won best handheld. I’m happy to see Bioware’s Mass Effect won something, too, as I am in love with that company. I’m totally having their babies.

Peter Moore has started a list of every backwards compatible Xbox game.

Backwards compatability not a priority for MS
How convenient. Promise backwards compatibility, do a so so job (no Soul Calibur 2?), then after a good number of systems have been sold announce that people aren’t really interested in backwards compatibility and that you aren’t really interested, either. Sounds a little like bait and switch. Obviously the backwards compatibility didn’t matter to everyone who bought a 360, but it’s still a shitty move by MS.

As someone on some other site pointed out, if people don’t want to play old games, what’s the deal with Live Arcade offering old games?

Ten new Dreamcast games coming
Goat Store Publishing has announced they will be releasing 10 new Dreamcast games. The games are said to be in varying genres. This is good news for the DC community and will hopefully inspire more new titles for the system. I would also like to point out to that annoying fucking kid on Sega’s message board (wait, that’s everyone) that the system is still dead. People still make C64 games, god damn you. Just accept the truth!

A fair and balanced look at PSP porn
Breaking news: PSPs can access the internet. This just in: There is pornography on the internet. So if a kid has a PSP, he can look at porn. A local Fox news site has broken this important story, which is not really a story because about every kid who has a PSP has access to a PC where he can not only watch, but save a ton of porn.

Notice how poorly the article is written. The first paragraph is either missing a period or is a huge run-on sentence. The phrase “out of thin air” is used multiple times because apparently wireless internet connections are magical to reporters. I may go as far as to say this article is slightly better written than Fox’s, and contains far more actual content.

* Fox seems to have pulled this article. Perhaps they realized how stupid it was, but probably not. Google has the page cached and I’ve copied the text of the article and posted it here. For those of you who want a more trust worthy source (I am constantly lying), here is Google’s cache of the article. Who knows how long it’ll work.

Nintendo preparing line of crappy looking GBA games
Bringing gaming back to its roots, Nintendo introduced its Bit Generations line of GBA games. These will be games with simple graphics and presumably easy to understand game mechanics. I predict they will fail horribly, but still hold onto the dream that they will be an immense success, and through this success will break down barriers between old and new games and gamers. All games that are fun will be respected, graphics will no longer matter, but graphical style and gameplay will. Iran will surrender its nukes, and we will dismantle ours. There will be hugs, not drugs. And so on.

The new Nintendo bit Generation Superman game still beats the N64 version.

Nintendo pretending budget titles are a fancy brand line
Another line of games from Nintendo, Touch Generations, offers simple gameplay that anyone can handle. I respect Nintendo’s attempt at reaching a wider market but fear they may ultimately want to dumb down games. I also can’t shake the feeling that with games like Sudoku and Brain Age, the DS will eventually have a huge catalog of games that play like Flash ports.

DirectX 10 not coming to Windows XP
It makes business sense, which means it must be evil. If Windows XP is too crappy for DirectX 10 then that makes sense. This probably isn’t the case, though. MS would rather force gamers to upgrade to Vista by not supporting the new DirectX, which new games will surely require.

Instead of an underhanded move like this, why not just make a new operating system that is impressive enough to make people want to upgrade by their own free will? Bill Gates never made his money by being honorable and he’s not about to start.

IGN cares about the Dreamcast again
I’m glad to see a major site honor Sega by reopening their DC section. Major publications don’t usually indulge in gaming’s past because it may alienate new, more casual gamers. Instead of devoting a new section to a dead system, though, why not just allow the writers to break into ten minute asides about classic gaming in whichever reviews they’d like? These sites/magazines put blinders on, only focusing on what’s new and will sell advertisements, and then expect to impress us when they cover older games. “Look at us, we care about old video games at this moment in time!”

IGN also mentions multiple times (perhaps jokingly) that the writers of the section are not being paid for their work. People who care enough about old video games to write about them without being paid?!? Imagine that.